Wrong weasels, wrong woodpile

As we noted previously, November 9th and 10th were a strange couple of days. Certain internet sites seem to have been blocked, presumably by French authorities. Les 4 Vérités has published an explanation, which although can’t be proven, seems believable. Though it was written by Emmanuel Ratier who dabbles in nutty conspiracy theories such as the US government having been behind the 9-11 attacks, he has written books on the functioning of politics that are taken seriously. He knows the political landscape and the functioning of government well enough to be somewhat plausible:

«Late on the afternoon of November 9th, within the measures taken by de Villepin (but obviously not made public), the Emeraude plan was deployed: it makes it possible to divert the whole of French internet traffic through military servers equipped with filters which block certain sites. Several methods were used: blocking IP addresses at the point of the routers. At Wanadoo, only domain name servers (DNS numbers) were filtered. At Cegetel, HTTP addresses HTTP were blocked, and so forth.

The majority of blocked sites and blogs weren’t the great many Muslim attack sites or the Islamists sites that were quite active (such as Oumma, Majlis, and the like) but the most active nationalist sites like Occidentalis, SOSfrance, Coranix and France-Echos.

The number of people hostile to the rioters rose greatly on internet bulletin boards and forums to the point that a number of the newspaper and media run discussion boards were shut down by their editors. France 5 said: "In view of the particularly violent content of the majority of the messages of the forum devoted to this show’s topic, we have decided to remove it. We will also remove discussion of this topic in our other forums." 2000 messages were erased.

Along the same lines, TF1 indicated: "Taking into account the number of messages posted it became impossible to publish them with all the seriousness and objectivity that befits a high quality forum. We are thus constrained to temporarily suspend the publication of the opinions on this highly significant subject."»

Here’s an example from a search engine looking for the discussion on a server that goes through that possible choke point:

Re: sosfrance + coranix -
coranix ne marche pas depuis wanadoo ni free (meme machine que fr-echo et occidentalis). Répondre à ce message • Informations techniques sur le filtrage ...
forum.subversiv.com/100261.html

And the link it leads to:

Message non trouvé...
Le message que vous cherchez n'a pas pu être trouvé. (100261)